My Take | Like it or not, John Lee is all we have
- With the opposition neutered, the next chief executive will have a much easier job than any of his predecessors. That may be its own curse
Now that the press has been muzzled, the opposition neutered and the property big boys put in their place, Lee has a free hand like no other chief executive before him. He will have no excuse for messing up Hong Kong; he can’t, after all, blame Beijing.
Until recently, few expected him to land the job, probably not even himself. But politics is a strange beast.
Will he do the minimum or the maximum to meet the job mandate handed to him? Will he be a mere soldier (well, in his case, a police officer), a bureaucrat or a leader? He has his work cut out. More than two decades after the handover, everyone knows what the city’s problems are.
But once he has carried out the basics of what Beijing expects of him, there is much he can do for Hong Kong.
He should quickly legislate the security law under Article 23 to put that out of the way.
There is, however, no real urgency to revive the extradition bill, which triggered the anti-government riots in 2019. The central government has made it clear that livelihood issues such as housing and inequality are the causes of social discontent, not lack of democracy.